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Despite the impacts of economic growth uncertainty, few studies have explicitly focused on how payments for ecosystem services (PES) can account for uncertainty in their benefits and costs caused by economic growth fluctuations. The objective of our study was to identify spatial targets for county-level PES by maximizing the expected future cost efficiency of ecological benefits under two growth scenarios and compare them with counties targeted during baseline years (i.e., 2001, 2006, and 2011) without considering growth uncertainty. Results using a case study of forest-based carbon storage in the Central and Southern Appalachian region show that spatial targeting based on estimates of carbon-cost efficiency for baseline years is significantly different from spatial targeting based on expected future carbon-cost efficiency. Our county-level map of expected future carbon cost efficiencies will help conservation organizations identify a cost-efficient allocation of incentive payments that is robust to changes in economic growth fluctuations over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]